The Generalitat has awarded the company Cospace, owner of the Aticco coworking chain, the project to convert the Barcelona Borsa building into a digital finance hub. The Tech Barcelona association, which three years ago devised the proposal within its strategy of converting emblematic buildings into offices for digital companies, has been left out of the project.
According to a statement from the Generalitat, which is the owner of the building, Aticco must convert five of the nine floors into offices specialized in the promotion and development of national and international financial projects, which provide support for sturtups in the emerging and growth. In addition, it also has to provide support to investors, neobanks, digital payment systems, cybersecurity and technologies linked to the legal world.
The award is for a period of six years and requires Aticco to pay 224,240 euros annually. The implementation of a financial hub is a project that complements other activities that are already carried out within the same historic building, located on Paseo de Gràcia. The space is the headquarters of the Barcelona Borsa, the Six stock market group, and also hosts the Barcelona Center Financer Europeu Association (BCFE).
The Generalitat maintains that the opening of this hub is strategic to position Catalonia in the digital financial ecosystem. However, the initiative was devised by Tech Barcelona. In fact, this association closed an agreement three years ago with Bolsas y Mercados Españoles (BME), the operator of all stock markets and financial systems in Spain controlled by Six, with the commitment to open a fintech hub in this same space. However, the authorization of the project had to have the approval of the Generalitat, which is the owner of the building and which in the past had occupied this space as the headquarters of the Department of Economy.
Sources from Tech Barcelona assure that in the end they did not participate in the competition since "they had to guarantee the strategic alignment and economic sustainability of the projects in which they are involved." These sources maintain that "after analyzing the conditions of the tender, they decided to concentrate on the spaces that currently make up their Urban Tech Campus, Pier 01, 03 and 07."
As for Cospace, the company has experience in renting offices to digital companies. Founded in Barcelona seven years ago, it controls the coworking firm Aticco Workspaces and the startup support company Aticco Lab. Currently, the company manages six spaces in Barcelona and one in Madrid. "The Borsa de Barcelona project is the most ambitious due to its content and international projection, but it is not at all the largest," explains Quino Fernández, one of the firm's directors. Beyond renting office space, the company is open to collaborating with the different agents of the digital ecosystem, "including Tech Barcelona", for the development of events and conferences.
The owners of this company are the three founding partners, Gabriel Espín, Franz Palleres and Juan Carlos Morales and, on a minority basis, the investment funds Reus Venture Capital, Famitex Inversiones and Turtle Capital. The company plans to invest more than one million in renovating the Barcelona Borsa space and opening it within six months. "We have received proposals from companies interested in renting the space," he says.
